2007年10月6日 星期六

Dear Eric:
We were so happy to talk with you by phone last evening. Obviously, though you are new to a foreign country, your adaptation to a new living has been fine. We are very pleased with that. It is a good habit to keep preparing lessons in advance and finishing home works without delay that would make it easy and efficient for listening and learning in classes. We know that everything will go smooth with you.
Today typhoon Krosa is hitting Taiwan, right now the wind is roaring out and the rain pouring heavily. We are fine, but are worried about those places ruined and families hurt by the typhoon. A strong typhoon is devastating harmful to lots of areas of the Island.
I bought a new Samsung NV3 simple camera a couple days ago, this camera is a little bit inferior to your Rollei’s, but is good enough for taking ordinary pictures. I’ve tried to compare the resolutions in detail of different pictures by taking them with the highest quality of 7MB pixels to the lowest 1MB pixel setups. I’ve discovered that almost no difference can be recognized on a full-size screen or 6”x4” printing out pictures, the clearnesses are about the same. The memory capacity of the former is 3.2 MB, and the latter 209 KB, in other words, the latter’s capacity is only 1/15 of the former one, but with having the same clearness (not to compare with enlarged ones). I am sending you several testing pictures as attached files with different capacities ranged in steps from 209 KM to 3.2 MB, Could you see any difference? Sometimes you are going to send pictures to us or friends by emails, I would suggest that pictures with lower capacity are fine and convenient. I’d like using 4MB resolution to take pictures now, it is moderate and satisfied. Photography is an interesting hobby, try it by yourself.
You told me you had not seen maple leaves in Canterbury, I went on to the webs, and it seemed few maple trees there. I remember that when I was a student at NCSU in Raleigh, I could see only few maple trees in the city and campus, however, in every autumn I drove with friends to the Blue Ridge Parkway（see attached linkhttp://www.blueridgeparkway.org/ It was the nation's first, and ultimately longest, rural parkway, connecting Shenandoah National Park in Virginia with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina. The Parkway follows the Appalachian Mountain chain and provides seemingly endless views of many parallel ranges connected by cross ranges and scattered hills. Trees are everywhere. ……）, touring on this very beautiful natural parkway, seeing a gorgeous colorful world that all mountains and valleys were filled with various leaves burst into color, dogwoods, sour woods, and black gums turned deep red, tulip trees and birches turned yellow, sassafras a vivid orange, and red maples added a multicolored brilliance. The gorgeous scenic beauty and charm always remind me of a famous Chinese poem ＜山行＞ by 杜牧, in which it says the frosting maple leaves are as reddish as spring flower blossoms. I immensely love these diversified, splendid, colorful autumn leaves, and the absorbing beautiful memory would never fade away for life. Kent has a merit name for the garden of England, I think Canterbury and U. Kent’s campus must be very charming and pretty, that enjoying the beauty of a flower, a tree, or appreciating the magnificent, beautiful landscapes are one of the greatest fortunes in our living. So enjoy them and appreciate them whenever you are taking a walk, or going to a leisurely tour somewhere around.
Love,
Dad and Mom
2007/10/06